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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28479309">Blackbird Taking Flight</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moniquill/pseuds/Moniquill'>Moniquill</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Original Work</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Arguably coming-of-age, Gen, Identity, Indigeneity, Not gonna lie this book is YA award bait the more I look at it, Other, Seeking an indigenous community for the end of the world</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 15:13:34</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>13,938</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28479309</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moniquill/pseuds/Moniquill</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Blackbird, a two-spirit individual, survives the end of the world. They try to pick up the pieces and embark on a quest to find an indigenous community on Aquidneck Island.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>24</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>     In the autumn of 2044, me and my close family were living in the Roger Williams Park Autonomous Zone. We’d come here on the advice of the chief, after spending a couple of weeks camping out in the grand ballroom at the Indian Council just after the eviction. I’d hopped on the farm team from day one, because not only had I spent most of my childhood subsistence farming, but I had two years of credits towards a degree in sustainable food and farming from UMass and was thus a proper and </span>
  <em>
    <span>credentialed</span>
  </em>
  <span> farmer. The white folks who did logistics loved credentials.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Just now I was hauling the morning’s harvest - couple of bushels of winter squash - to the food bunker. It was in the old Parks Department building, which had become the main site for logistics - it still had power, because the roof was done in solar shingle. Only building inside the barricade that did.  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Grandma was there when I arrived, perched on a metal folding chair, surrounded by an arc of children. She was telling them a story, and all of them were shucking corn together. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Hey all,” I said, pushing the wheelbarrow in front of me, heading for the shelves where whole squash were being put by. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Hi, Auntie!” Several of the kids said in uneven unison. Grandma just smiled and nodded in my direction and went back to telling her story. The kids were putting their shucked ears of flint corn into a big plastic tote in the middle of the group and setting the husks neatly aside. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     The flint corn harvest was just about over, and so were turtle beans. Squashes were still ripening, so not final count on those yet, and never mind all the other crops in the greenhouse.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     We had about fifteen hundred people living inside the barricade; assuming a pound of corn per person per day, we had enough corn put by to hold out for four months. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Of the fifteen hundred people occupying the autonomous zone, probably a hundred of us identified as NDN - mostly Narragansett, but a decent showing of Mashpee and Nipmuc, a Metis couple and their grown kids down from Maine, a few Pequots up from Mashantucket. The occupation of Edgewood Island - and specifically of the botanical center - had grown out of Landback protest after the Big Drum Powwow last year. Folks in the TakeBack movement had got wind of it and joined up, and it’d snowballed from there. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     When my barrow was empty, I turned around to find one of the kids had broken from the group and was standing at the head of the shelves, patiently waiting for my attention. I fished around in my brain for a name; I knew she was one of my cousin Sandy’s middle kids, a pair of sisters - not twins but close enough - who I didn’t see apart often enough to memorize separately. Before we’d joined the occupation I’d only ever seen them at powwows and other tribe events, really. This was either Cora or Abby, and she was either nine or ten.  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Yeah?” I said, inviting her to tell me what she wanted.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Are you going back to the farm from here?” she asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Yeah, was heading back that way. Why?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Can I come too?” She had this super-ernest, kind of anxious look that made me think that there was more to her request than wanting to come pick vegetables or feed the goats.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “If Grandma says it’s ok,” I said, glancing her way. Grandma nodded back at me, letting me know it was. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I waited until we were outside to ask,</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “So are you Abby, or are you Cora?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I expected an eye roll and a bemoaning ‘</span>
  <em>
    <span>Auntie</span>
  </em>
  <span>!’ at my failure to tell the sisters apart when they weren’t even twins and they didn’t even look alike. What I got was a frown and a solid thirty seconds of silence as we walked up Cladrash’s Ave. We were definitely out of earshot of anyone hanging around the building before she visibly steeled herself and turned to me. She asked, in the kind of serious voice that only little kids trying to be very serious can produce,</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Auntie, how old were you when you figured out you were two-spirit?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Oh. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Oh</span>
  </em>
  <span>. Ok, </span>
  <em>
    <span>that</span>
  </em>
  <span> was the conversation we were having.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Probably when I was eleven or twelve,” I said, speculating. “I didn’t have a naming ceremony about it until I was fourteen, though - spent a while flopping around like an eel trying to figure it out, you know? But I was probably about eleven when I knew that ‘boy’ didn’t feel right.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     She nodded, looking away. Looking at the flock of geese that was eating grass by the edge of the lake. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I think I’m not a girl,” she said, very quietly. “I haven’t told anybody except Abby.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Ok, so if she’d told Abby this meant I was talking to Cora. Put a pin in </span>
  <em>
    <span>that</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Abby’s always been, like, more girly-girl than me and Mom says I’m a tomboy and I’ve heard Dad say that I’m probably gay but then Mom yelled at him about that, so I don’t even know. Abby says you don’t have to be into girl stuff to be a girl, I just… I don’t think I’m a girl, not like the way Abby’s a girl, you know?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I’m happy you trust me enough to tell me,” I said. I knew that it wasn’t because Cora and me were super close or anything - we weren’t, not more than I was with any of my other nieces and nephews and cousins her age - but because I was The Obviously Queer Cousin. I asked, “Is this a secret?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     She nodded and said, “Yeah. I dunno… My dad’s gonna be mad.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Sandy’s husband was a white guy, and all I knew about him was that he was kind of insufferable and that being besieged together was </span>
  <em>
    <span>not</span>
  </em>
  <span> doing great things for their marriage.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “If your dad gets mad at you for being who you are, that’s not your fault - that’s him being dumb,” I said. “It’d be like him getting mad that you’ve got freckles.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     She laughed in a way that sounded more like a hiccup, and we walked quietly for a little bit, and she asked,</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I wanna tell my mom, but I don’t know how. Can you help? Like… like can you be there when I tell her? You and mom are friends, right?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Me and Sandy were </span>
  <em>
    <span>cousins</span>
  </em>
  <span>, more like siblings than like friends, with all the baggage that entailed. We’d both grown up at the commune in Scituate, but she’d moved out years before the eviction. We weren’t close like we had been as kids. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     But I wasn’t about to go into all that with Cora.  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Yeah, no problem,” I said. “You just tell me when and where, and I’ll be there. This is important stuff, cuz, and I am there for you one hundred percent. For what it’s worth, I think your mom will get it and not freak out or anything. She loves you </span>
  <em>
    <span>so</span>
  </em>
  <span> much, you and your sister and your brothers. You telling her about who you are isn’t gonna change that.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Because I knew I could say that about Sandy in a way I couldn’t say it about Sandy’s husband, whose name I couldn’t even remember. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     We arrived at the farm, and I ditched the wheelbarrow. I wiped my dusty hands off on my thighs and asked,</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I was planning on starting seeds for stuff to grow in the greenhouse over the winter. You wanna help?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Yeah, ok,” she said. “Can you tell me what it was like when you figured out you weren’t a boy? Like, I know times were different way back then-”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Ah yes, back then in the deep and distant era of ‘about ten years ago’.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     There were a bunch of other people in and around the greenhouses; other members of the farm team, mostly. I introduced Cora around as my little cousin, making special effort to find the ‘very obviously queer as hell’ members. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     We planted kale and turnips and beets, and we fed the goats, and Cora asked a lot of questions about queerness. Around dinner time we all walked back together to the Parks Department building, because that’s where the community kitchen was, and Cora went to find her sister and their friends. I thought about my own sister as I  watched her go, wondering if she was doing ok in Boston. Made a mental note to text her after dinner on the community phone. I went to find Mom and Grandma to shoot the shit about the day - Grandma would want to know what Cora’d wanted to talk to me about, and I wouldn’t be able to confirm or deny anything, and she’d know exactly what that meant.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I went to bed that night game-planning how to talk to Sandy.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     But that night, the world ended. </span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Warning for police and institutional violence in this chapter.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>     I woke up to the sound of helicopters. I wasn’t even really awake yet while I was fumbling on clothes and stumbling out of the tent that served as my personal bedroom. By the time I was all the way awake, I was out in the botanical center’s parking lot with a shovel in my hand as a makeshift weapon.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     A shovel was a wholly ineffective weapon for what we were abruptly facing. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     The whole place suddenly lit up blinding by a spotlight, and someone was shouting through a bullhorn. I squared up with a line of others in the parking lot, running headlong into the riot.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     It ended quickly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Tear gas and firehoses, flashbangs and rubber bullets, an unrelenting wall of cops in riot gear. They were beating people senseless and loading them into an armored bus that was parked on Floral Ave. I had someone else’s blood on my face when I was arrested, somebody who’d taken a ‘nonlethal’ bullet to the eye right next to me. Got cracked in the back of the head by a police baton and muscled into a bus and shackled down.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     In the processing center, they stripped us all bare-ass naked and gave us the disposable kind of hospital scrubs to wear. No shoes. All items confiscated. They took our pictures, for facial recognition and identification. I ended up in a concrete box with something like forty other people they’d decided were men, with one sink and one toilet and absolutely nothing else. There were cameras set into each of the corners, shielded in little bubbles of impact-resistant plastic.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     There was no way to tell day from night; the overhead lights stayed on all the time and there were no windows. Hours into our incarceration, a man in our holding cell had something go wrong with his insulin pump. We screamed for help, tried to make the cops aware of the situation. No one came.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     He died.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Nobody came to remove the body, either.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Hours and hours after </span>
  <em>
    <span>that</span>
  </em>
  <span>, they started calling us out of the holding cell one by one, in alphabetical order by last name. We’d all arranged to rush the door the hot second they opened it, but that just led to them tear-gassing the room and tasing anyone who made it past the threshold. Two or three rounds of that and everyone was quiet when they opened the door. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I stepped up when they called my birth-certificate name because noncompliance had gotten us fuck-all. Because I was tired and hungry and a lot of the people in our cell had already been taken out and hadn’t come back, which meant they were being put somewhere else. The cops marched me through a maze of windowless hallways and sat me down on a metal chair bolted to the floor in a fluorescent-lit concrete room the size of a closet, facing a camera. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     The proceedings were explained by a recording that droned out of unseen speakers.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     My state-appointed defense was an AI. My judge was an AI. If there was a jury of any kind, they were calling it in remotely from some other room. I kind of doubted there was - the supreme court’d ruled back in ‘39 that folks mass-arrested during ‘civil unrest’ could be processed in non-jury trials. It saved a lot of money, and it made everything go faster and smoother. Time between arrest and sentencing was a money-sink for taxpayers, after all. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     The algorithms argued with one another for maybe five minutes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     There was video of a person - identified as me - swinging a shovel at the advancing line of riot cops. I honestly didn’t know if it was me or not; details of what I’d been doing after the flashbangs started were fuzzy. There was a decent chance that I had a concussion - hadn’t been medically examined yet, which I was pretty sure was wildly in violation of human rights laws.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     It didn’t matter either way, in the end, if it was me in the video or not.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     If I’d been allowed to make testimony, I might have argued that my people had been on Turtle Island since the beginning of time, and that the US government had broken literally every treaty it had ever signed with my folks, and that the government at large was kind of bullshit. I might have argued that I couldn’t be charged with misuse of public lands, because I had an existing right to those lands.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I hadn’t been allowed to make testimony.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     At the end of the deliberation, I was charged with ‘assaulting officers’ and ‘assisting insurrection’ and ‘high treason to the United States of America’ and a bunch of other things. It was a long list; what mattered was that it made me a felon. I’d been growing vegetables on land that wasn’t mine, and I’d been feeding them to folks who had weightier charges than me, and probably I’d injured a federal officer, and certainly I’d resisted arrest.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     So I was sentenced to fifty years of incarceration.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Fifty years of incarceration meant fifty years of slavery in service to some kind of for-profit contractor. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude </span>
  <em>
    <span>except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted</span>
  </em>
  <span> shall exist within the United States and all that.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Just like that,I stopped being a citizen and became a contracted worker. I stopped being a person and became an asset.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Algorithms looked at my personal history - my education, my employment record, previous misdemeanor convictions, all the other public data that existed about me. They generated a personality profile, a set of psychological predictions about what I was likely or unlikely to comply with.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     It was later that day that I was finally examined by a person who was probably a doctor. It took all of five minutes, and I was declared sound enough to be put in suspension - frozen prisoners didn’t make trouble. The energy cost on cryostasis was pretty high, but still cheaper in the long run than the room and board and guards and all associated with a brick and mortar prison. They gave me a supplement drink that tasted like raw soy flour, which was the first thing I’d put in my stomach in what had to be more than twenty-four hours. I was popped into a cryo pod for warehousing and transit. I’d be warehoused until a company bought my labor sentence, then shipped to whatever farm or factory needed another pair of hands. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     If I was </span>
  <em>
    <span>really</span>
  </em>
  <span> lucky, I wouldn’t end up dying there.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Awakening</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>     Cold. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Head pounding and dizzy and nauseated and so fucking </span>
  <em>
    <span>cold</span>
  </em>
  <span>. Colder than that time Briar and Sandy and I had ridden out a blizzard in a van under an overpass on 295. Colder than the time I’d fallen through the ice on the scituate reservoir.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     There was a neutral computer voice repeating something over and over, and it took me a few repeats before I could understand.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Emergency reanimation successful - vital signs stable. Please exit the chamber.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     It was a few more repeats before I could convince my body to do anything. My arms and legs didn’t want to move. I didn’t know how long it took me to struggle up to sitting, and when I did the nausea kicked into high gear and I leaned over the side of the box I was in and dry-heaved. Nothing came up; my stomach was empty.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     There was a ‘flooded basement’ kind of smell in the air, wet rot and mildew and mud. It was dark - the only lights were the blue-white LEDs on the coffin-like box I was sitting in. I was still wearing the disposable scrubs from jail, and I had no shoes, and I was fucking </span>
  <em>
    <span>cold</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     It was probably a couple of minutes that I sat there just looking around and trying to figure out what was going on. The computer voice kept telling me to exit the chamber, but it was easy enough to tune out. The room I was in looked like it’d been hit by a hurricane. Part of the ceiling was caved in, burying rows of boxes like mine. None of them had lights. The sound of dripping water was coming from somewhere, echoing around enough that I couldn't pinpoint the source. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     After a while I climbed out of the box and struggled to my feet, bracing against the side until I could stand. Managed to walk a few steps, over to the box right next to mine - there was a whole row of them. It was glass-fronted, like mine had been.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     There was a freeze-dried mummy inside.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     What. The entire. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Fuck</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I staggered backwards until my back was against a wall, and slid down it to sit with my knees drawn up. I was making a noise that was someplace between laughing, screaming, and sobbing. I rocked a little, because rocking felt better than stillness.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I didn’t know how long it took for the meltdown to burn itself out, only that I eventually recovered the wherewithal to uncurl myself and wipe my face and take a few breaths. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Ok. No matter what else was going on, this place was obviously fucked and no one was coming, so I had to find my way out on my own. I stood up, and put my left hand on the wall, and kept it there while I walked. When i found a doorway, I went through it. Wasn’t locked. I ended up in a narrow hallway of unfinished cinderblock, doors every twenty feet or so. I could see because there was another caved-in section of roof at the other end, and light was spilling in from outside. I followed that light around a corner and up a staircase of very questionable safely. Shit didn’t get less weird when I finally got to an exit - it had to be muscled open by inches, digging through the drift of silty mud that was banked up on the other side. I climbed up a muddy bank to a stretch of tall, dead grass. It was overcast out, cold. Not actually freezing, though, thank fuck. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Some shit had clearly gone down here, wherever ‘here’ was.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I was in the middle of a bunch of broken cinder blocks and stone and glass, rusted steel beams stretching upward in some places. All of it was full of grass and weeds in the wind-sheltered places and cracks, tangles of dead vines climbing the rusted steel and hanging in matted sheets. There were whole </span>
  <em>
    <span>trees</span>
  </em>
  <span> growing out from the broken pavement, stretches of grass and brush between. It looked like pictures I’d seen of Chernobyl; nature relentlessly claiming back what humans had paved over. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Ok, just thinking of survival triage, I needed to find shelter before sundown. Ideally, I needed to find some better clothes and some shoes. Needed to find a source of potable water inside of a day or two, food within a week. Needed to find </span>
  <em>
    <span>people</span>
  </em>
  <span>, because nothing is better for human survival than other humans.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I hauled myself up a rocky hill that might have been a building once, just trying to get to a high point to see the lay of the land. It felt like morning. That was utterly baseless, but going with my gut and presuming it </span>
  <em>
    <span>was</span>
  </em>
  <span> morning, I found the sun among the clouds and faced east. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I was on a hill overlooking a body of water; lots of cattails. A kettle pond with wetland all around it, an inlet in its northeast corner going into a river beyond. Open water was maybe a quarter mile east of me. There were a pair of herons walking through the cattail beds at the edge of the pond, which said good things about potential forage down there.  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Turning to face north, there was a wide, flat path cutting pretty obviously across the landscape. Like maybe it’d been a road, once. Following it with my gaze, it met with a tangle of other paths. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     A clover crossing.  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Well, like the cat said to Alice - if you don’t know where you’re going any road will take you there. I set myself along the ‘road’, heading for the ridge that has probably been the overpass before it’d collapsed and gathered a coat of topsoil.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I walked uphill when the grade was clear, path of least resistance through the ruins when it wasn’t. I’d never been all about the orienteering part of junior rangers, preferring the lifeways lessons the chief’s mom had in her basement and backyard. I was kicking myself for it now. The overpass turned out to be unscalable, so I stayed along the road that was going northeast. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     It took me fifteen or twenty minutes of walking before I created a ridge and figured out where I was. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I was standing on a sheer cutaway, looking down into a valley full of more or less intact buildings. A strip mall.  The big stone-and steel monolith at its entrance was still standing, the plastic signs announcing the anchor stores still legible. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Shaws. REI. Petco. Staples. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     That was Chapel View. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I was standing on what’d been the clover intersection where Route 2 crossed Route 37, and I was looking down into Chapel View and Garden City, and it didn’t look like there’d been a single human here for… what? Twenty, thirty, fifty years? </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     As a kid I’d briefly been really obsessed with post-apocalyptic fiction. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Earth Abides</span>
  </em>
  <span> and </span>
  <em>
    <span>A Canticle for Leibowitz</span>
  </em>
  <span> and </span>
  <em>
    <span>The Stand</span>
  </em>
  <span> - though that last one had a bunch of really weird hyper-christian magical weirdness, so I hadn’t liked it as much as the others. My favorite had been </span>
  <span>S. M. Stirling’s whole </span>
  <em>
    <span>Emberverse</span>
  </em>
  <span> because it was mostly about folks rebuilding new societies. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Didn’t seem to be anyone nearby to rebuild society with, just now. But there was a derelict REI in spitting distance, which might have some useful survival equipment. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     So that’s the direction I headed in.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Blackbird meets another person.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>     The canoe was one of the first things I saw upon climbing in through the shattered glass of the front window - the door glass was intact and the doors were locked. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     It was one of those polyethylene ones made all in one piece - a three-seater, bright red, in like-new condition because plastic is eternal. It was perched haphazardly across the tops of shelves - good bet that it’d been hanging from the ceiling. A display model. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     It was obvious right away that flood waters had been in here at some point; everything was muddy and silty up to about knee level. The big metal shelving units seemed to still be mostly in place, and from the sheer amount of goods still in stock it didn’t look like anyone had been through looting. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Upon inspection, wet rot and mildew had trashed a whole lot of stuff that might have been useful otherwise. I found some intact bottled water, cracking one bottle open and downing it immediately, grabbing a second to sip while I explored the rest of the interior. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I found clothes pretty easily; things that were on shelves above the flood line, still packed in vacuum plastic. Put together a whole outfit from long underwear out. Most of the stuff that survived was synthetic material - wool and cotton and silk got reclaimed by nature while plastic didn’t - but that couldn’t really be helped. I found enough spares to make two other outfits, and a backpack to stash them in. A good pair of hiking boots, a pair of silicone rain boots. The plan formed itself as I gathered items; I hauled the canoe out into the parking lot and began filling it with useful essentials. A tent, a sleeping bag, a ton of firestarters, cookware and eating ware, a couple of cases of bottled water. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     If I was in Cranston and there weren’t any people here, it made sense to try and head upriver toward Providence. Travelling by water would be quicker than travelling over land, given the state of the roads. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     REI didn’t have any fishing gear, which was a pain. Still, if this store was typical then there’d be other places to scavenge for supplies.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Having loaded up my canoe with survival gear, I had to spend the better part of an hour dragging it overland until I got to the waterfront where I could launch it. It was definitely past noon when I hauled myself in and pushed off into the shallows. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I followed the shoreline pretty closely, trying to work out landmarks. This was pretty clearly the Pawtuxet I was following, though the whole area seemed to be massively flooded. If I headed east, I’d eventually get to where it joined the Providence River, which would take me right into the heart of downtown. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     It was afternoon by the time I got to Silverhook. What ought to have been Oxboes Park was completely underwater, and the join to the Providence River was couched in a wide stretch of wetland. The canoe cut easily through the water, and the day - while cold and overcast - was calm. From the state of plants, I guessed that it was maybe mid-to-late April.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I passed by a herd of deer that’d come down to the water to drink. They watched me as I went, but didn’t turn or bolt. Didn’t know enough to be afraid of humans. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     It was coming on to evening by the time I got to the ruins of the east side. There were no bridges spanning the river now; there were twisted metal ruins on the shore where the 195 overpass should have been, not even that for Point Street. The whole skyline of Providence was crumbled down beyond recognition. The State House was still standing, perched on a little island, and the heaps of wreckage next to it had to be what was left of the mall.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I made land at what’d been Benefit Street. I could tell mostly from the line of uneven bricks hemmed in with bars of granite that had been the sidewalks, by the parallel line of rusty hulks that’d been cars. I made camp on the raised patch of ground in front of the ruins of the First Unitarian Church, which was still mostly recognizable because it was made of huge blocks of white granite. The spire had collapsed, and all the windows were broken, but it was definitely still a building and not a wreck like the wooden and red brick buildings around it. I didn’t trust its integrity enough to go inside, though. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Camp made, I headed down the riverbank and gathered myself some freshwater mussels and cattail shoots. Gathered firewood. Started a fire. Shucked mussels and examined the meat; nothing looked or smelled off, but that didn’t mean they weren’t carrying heavy metals or toxins. Still, I hadn’t eaten since waking up in an ice coffin. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I hadn’t eaten in fifty years, or a hundred, or whatever.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I sat there next to my fire, stirring my mussel and cattail soup, laughing and then crying at the thought. I’d been travelling all day, and hadn’t seen a single sign of human life. I was right in the middle of Providence, surrounded by the ruins of Brown and RISD, what should have been a population center.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I heard a heron calling in the distance, as I sat there and ate my soup and watched the sun go down over the drowned ruins of the city. I banked the fire and crawled into my sleeping bag and cried myself to sleep.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I woke to a woman’s voice calling, </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Hello?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Hello!” I shoulder back, scrambling for awareness, struggling up out of my sleeping bag and out of the tent, hoping that I wasn’t just crazy or dreaming.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     She was standing by the fire when I stumbled out of the tent. Girl, highschool-aged, starved-looking. She was holding a hunting knife, not exactly pointing it at me but keeping it ready. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I saw your fire,” she said. “I figured you were maybe a hunter or a trapper or something and... the caravan I was with got knocked over by raiders three days ago, and I ran away, and now I’m just lost…”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “My name’s Blackbird,” I said. “What’s yours?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Sarah,” she said. She swallowed hard and asked, “You a vassal of the PPD?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “...No,” I answered. “I’m not with anybody. You’re the first person I’ve seen.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     She seemed to relax a little, and asked,</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “May I sit by your fire?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Yeah, of course,” I said. “Um… I’ve got what’s left of some mussel and cattail soup. It was gonna be breakfast, but I can just gather more ingredients when it’s light again.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “What do you want in trade for food?” she asked, sounding wary. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I got the feeling that she wouldn’t be happy with an answer of ‘nothing’ or reassurances of basic hospitality. That didn’t seem to be the set of rules she was used to playing by.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I want for you to tell me about this place,” I said. “Where you came from, and where you’re going, and why. I haven’t seen any other people around here.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     She nodded, relaxing a little bit. I sat down on the other side of the fire, making sure to give her space. I dug out the thermos full of soup I’d set aside and handed it to her. I turned back to dig out a spoon, but she’d already started picking out bits with her fingers. She ate frantically, like she hadn’t eaten in days. Maybe she hadn’t.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I stirred the fire back to life and added more wood. More light let me get a better look at her. She was white, with long brown hair that clearly hadn’t seen a comb or brush in days. She was wearing a seriously beat-up leather jacket, but under that she was wearing a sundress and canvas shoes that’d probably been white once. Not seasonable clothing for April in Rhode Island.   </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “You came on that boat there, yeah?” Sarah asked, looking over at the canoe. I’d pulled it well up onto shore because I hadn’t known if the river was tidal, or what tides looked like here if it was. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Yeah,” I said. “Came from south and west of here, up the river.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “This’s Providence County you’re in, which is under the PPD except up on Mount Hope. You looking to trade with the PPD, or the Mount Hope folks?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “We were going to talk about where </span>
  <em>
    <span>you</span>
  </em>
  <span> came from,” I said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I’m from Lincoln, the settlement by the old airport,” she said. “We’re vassal to the PPD, there. I was gonna be tithed to Wolf Hill, but like I said there were raiders and they jumped the caravan… three days ago, if I’m counting right? They chased me a while, but I lost them in the swamp.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “When you say PPD-” I asked. She looked at me, narrowing her eyes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “You’re not from around here, are you?” she asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “No, I’m not,” I said. “What does PPD mean?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Providence Police Department,” she said. “They’re the lords around here. All the settlements tithe to them - Lincoln and Dowling Village and Wright’s Farm and Chepachet and all. They put off the raiders, mostly.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “When you said you were gonna be tithed-” I asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “As a wife,” she said, like that should have been totally obvious. “I know I’m old for it-”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “How old are you?” I asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Nineteen.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I’m twenty-two,” I said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Doesn’t matter much, for a man, now does it?” She asked with a thin smile.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I didn’t correct her on her assumption that I was a man. We weren’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>there</span>
  </em>
  <span> yet. Tucked away the fact that gender roles seemed pretty strict here. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “My youngest sister was supposed to be our family’s tithe when she turned sixteen, but she got a fever and died over the summer and </span>
  <em>
    <span>someone</span>
  </em>
  <span> had to go with the tithing men when they came, so it was me,” she said. “By rights, I ought to try and find my way to Wolf Hill and present myself. But I figure everyone thinks the raiders got me - it’s all on record that I was handed off to the tithing men, so my folks’ve done their tithing. I’ve got a pretty good idea of just which officer wants to wed me, and I don’t much like him. Figured if I could find a trader, I could hitch on with them to Boston or New York or something, find a husband and start up a new life there.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I’m going to ask you a question, and it’s going to sound super crazy,” I said, taking a breath. “Can you tell me what year it is?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     She stared at me in mute silence that had me scrambling, and I said,</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I told you it was going to sound super crazy! What year is it by your count here?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “It’s just gone one-sixteen,” she said, slowly. “The tithing men come about new year. You from someplace they count years different?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I was put on ice in the year 2044,” I said. “I woke up this morning.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “You’re a </span>
  <em>
    <span>freezepack</span>
  </em>
  <span>?” she said, warily.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I guess?” I said. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “That only happens in stories,” she said. “Haven’t been any freezepacks since back before Hurricane Boxer, back when my parents were my age. Freezepacks come from the old world jail, and all that’s underwater now. They’re all criminals, every single one.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Being a criminal meant a lot of different things in 2044,” I said. “If the year is one-sixteen now, what’s that counting from?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “From the year of the Sattle measles,” she said, like she wasn’t sure if I was being serious or not. “You never been told that story?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “No,” I said. “You want to tell it to me?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Can I stay by your fire until morning?” she asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Yes,” I said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Alright then. A place at your fire for a story, that’s fair. Now, I don’t tell this story as well as some do, but I mostly remember how it goes,” she said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Then she started.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Sarah tells the story of the end.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>     “Now, back in the old times, things were better,” Sarah said, falling into a kind of cadence that I knew in my bones. This was oral tradition, a story she was repeating word for word.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “There were more people, in the old times, enough to have built all these wonders we see around us. Every single house had its own electric, and everyone had computers in their pockets that could all talk to each other all over the whole world. You could send a message to someone in Boston or New York, or Texas or California, or China orJapan. They could send a message back just as quick - just like you were talking to them face to face. It was called texting. So everyone knew everything there was to know, back in the old times, and sometimes it was too much to know, and people went crazy of it.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Now, back in the old times, things weren’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>well</span>
  </em>
  <span> - because people were packed in shoulder by shoulder and they were quarrelsome about it. People knew so much it made them crazy, and quarreled about that. People quarreled about god and nature and how settlements ought to be put together and who ought to be lords and who ought to be vassals. Things were not </span>
  <em>
    <span>well</span>
  </em>
  <span>. But things were </span>
  <em>
    <span>better</span>
  </em>
  <span>. There was always enough food to go around, and electric heat and light, and more clean water that anyone knew what to do with. Everybody lived like lords, back in the old times.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     She paused, looking pensive. I offered her a bottle of water from the case. She took it, but didn’t open in. I added more wood to the fire. She went on.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Now, back in the old times, there were doctors with medicines that could stop people from getting sick. In the old times, nobody ever got measles or mumps or poxes or fevers or death-coughs or tetanus. Nobody had to make do with just herbs and salt and prayer - every settlement had doctors and hospitals with electric, and whole stores of pills for this, that and the other. People hardly ever died of being sick, back in the old times.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     But there were folks who decided it was evil, against nature and god and whatever else, to use those medicines. That sect of folks were called antevaxers. Sometimes they got sick, and sometimes they died, and sometimes they made other people sick.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     In a big settlement west of the sunset called Sattle, the antevaxers lived in numbers. A pack of kids in a daycare all caught measles because lots of them were antevaxers. Some of those kids had bad blood that made the measles </span>
  <em>
    <span>change</span>
  </em>
  <span>. There’s a word for that but I can’t remember it now, something like mute, but not… anyhow. The changed measles could catch in everyone. Even in people who’d taken medicine against regular measles. Now, back in old times there were so many people, all packed shoulder by shoulder, all sharing the same air and water. There were airplanes - you can see the ruins of them on TF Green Island - that could fly with five hundred people inside from any place in the world to any other place. Every single person had a car of their own and could drive anywhere they wanted any time. So the changed measles spread like a house fire. Out of every ten people living in the whole wide world, nine of them died.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I sucked my breath through my teeth at that, and she paused like she expected me to say something. It was impolite to interrupt a story, though. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Now, back in old times, everybody leaned on everybody else just like we do now, but </span>
  <em>
    <span>more</span>
  </em>
  <span> - because back in old times</span>
  <em>
    <span> everything</span>
  </em>
  <span> was more. Lots of people who didn’t die of the measles were left blind or deaf or addle-brained by it. Lots of women were left unable to carry children to birthing, and lots of men were left with weak seed. There weren’t enough living people to bury the dead ones, and the rotting dead spoiled the air and the water, and people got sick and died of that. The people left alive were scattered far apart, left with no one to lean on. Lots of people died of not having food or medicine or company, so for another generation people got less and less. All of mankind’s works began to fall apart, without people to tend them. Still, there were folks who tried to make things right again, folks like the PPD. Mankind had been kicked down off the tower we built, and it took another whole generation for us to get back up - for lords and kings to start gathering folks in settlements and townships.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “And all that was a hundred and sixteen years ago?” I asked after she was silent long enough that it seemed like the story had ended.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “So says the counting,” Sarah said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Fuck,” I said, my breath catching in my throat. I’d been arrested and thrown into cryo and while I was in there the world had gone full-blown end times apocalypse on me. Everybody I’d ever known was dead... My mom and my grandma and all my aunts and uncles and cousins. Everyone at the indian council. All my classmates from Dartmouth. All the riot cops who’d come to put down the occupation. All the occupiers. Sandy. Briar. That white boy who watched kids down at the carousel village camp who I’d hooked up with the week before the cops. Cora, who’d just started thinking that maybe she wasn’t a girl.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>     Everyone.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>     I was the only person alive who remembered any of them.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I’m… gonna need a minute…” I said, my voice shaking. “Gonna… take a walk.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     She looked like she was thinking of saying something, then thought better of it. I left her there, sitting by the fire, and walked down to the riverbank. The bank of the river that’d been South Main Street last time I’d been here. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     The sky was just starting to get light in the east, and everything was gray, and I had no fucking idea what to do with what I’d just been told. I didn’t even have it in me to cry about it. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I kept standing there until the sun came up.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Chapter 6</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>A game plan is made</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>     Sarah was still sitting by the fire, poking at it with a stick, when I walked back to camp. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “You really </span>
  <em>
    <span>hadn’t</span>
  </em>
  <span> been told that story before, huh?” she asked as I sat down opposite her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “No,” I said. “Like I said before, I was on ice. Woke up yesterday morning.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “What were you in jail for?” she asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I was one of the people occupying Roger Williams Park - an effort to return public lands to public use during the housing crisis that kicked off in 2042, after the stock market crash.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “None of what you just said made any kind of sense,” she said, staring at me. In the morning light, I could see that here eyes were a flinty kind of gray. I sighed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “My and my family and a bunch of other folks started a settlement on land that someone else figured they owned,” I said. “They called the cops - police - to take us away. I put up a fight when they tried to take me away, so they put me in jail.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Why’d you try to start a settlement on someone else’s land?” she asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Lot of reasons,” I said. “Mostly because there wasn’t any land that </span>
  <em>
    <span>wasn’t</span>
  </em>
  <span> somebody else’s. I grew up squatting - living on land didn’t belong to my family. Used to be we had land of our own in Little Compton, but we lost that to sea level rise and storm surges. My dad and my uncle ran a landscaping company that mostly did commercial work, knew about this mcmansion cul-de-sac in Warren right near the Mass line - a bunch of really nice houses for really rich people - that was completely empty because of the housing crunch. Nobody could afford to buy million dollar houses in the 2030’s. We lived there for most of my childhood. We had plenty of sun and dirt, and half a dozen acres of woods around us, so we were basically subsistence farming - chickens and vegetables. My uncle would hunt deer and turkey and geese, and the chief had a little catboat and would fish and clam in the Kickemuit. We were allowed to fish in the protected area, because of tribal sovereignty laws. I got a scholarship to UMass Dartmouth through the Indian Council, but it only covered two years and my grades were only average, so I couldn’t get a renewal or scratch together enough different scholarships to cover me. I sure as hell wasn’t qualifying for any loans, so I never got to finish my degree. Then in 2043, a different bank bought out all the houses in the cul-de-sac and went through the whole eviction process. We moved into the Roger Williams occupying camp after that. Now I’m here.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “So...you’re an Indian, then? Like </span>
  <em>
    <span>Pocahontas</span>
  </em>
  <span>?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Well here I was figuring I was more like Squanto, being snatched up by white people only to come back home and find my whole tribe dead. But sure, let’s go with that. What do you know about Pocahontas?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “She’s in one of the storybooks my mom read me and my sisters when we were little,” she said. “There were songs that went with the story, I know some of them. My favorite one from Pocahontas is Colors of the Wind.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Yeah, that sure is a song that I also know,” I said, deadpan. “So you’ve got the Disney version.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Yeah!” she said, brightening. “Pocahontas was a princess, the daughter of the Indian Chief, which is what Indians have instead of kings. The story is about how English folks came to settle where her folks were living, and she fell in love with John Smith, and they stopped there from being a war between the Indians and the English folks.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I nodded, because it was good to know that that was the version of the story she was working from. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “That’s not how it was, in actual history,” I said. “She was an actual person, not just a story princess like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “My mom said none of the stories in our storybooks were real-for-real,” she said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Pocahontas was,” I said. “Her real name was Matoaka - Pocahontas is a nickname that basically means ‘brat’, but in an affectionate way. She was only twelve years old when the whole contact with John Smith happened, and he probably made up the whole incident where she supposedly saved his life because he was known to be a lying liar. She was married to a man named Kokoum-”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “He’s in the story!” Sarah interrupted. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “He was killed when or just after she was kidnapped and held hostage, in 1613. During her captivity she converted to Christianity and got baptized under the name Rebecca. She ended up marrying a tobacco farmer named John Rolfe. He brought her back to England, where she became a celebrity, and she died there.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “That’s not a very good story,” Sarah said, poking the fire again. I went to add more wood, but there wasn’t anything left of the little pile I’d set aside yesterday.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Actual reality doesn’t often follow a three-act structure with star-crossed lovers,” I said with a snort of laughter.  “Also, the English never left Jamestown, and they didn’t colonize peacefully. There were three different Anglo-Powhattan wars.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “How do you know all that?” Sarah asked, glaring suspiciously at me.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Basic history lessons through a native lens,” I said. “One of my aunties was in middle school when that movie came out, and she had a </span>
  <em>
    <span>lot</span>
  </em>
  <span> to say about it. They made her sing Colors of the Wind in chorus.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Sarah said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “For a native kid going to a predominantly white school? It’s a bad thing.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     She frowned, but didn’t say anything.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “So what about you?” I asked at length, “You said last night that you grew up in Lincoln?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Yeah, our settlement is at the old airport, near Rocky Hill. Don’t know why they call it an airport, since it didn’t ever have any planes at it. Our settlement goes from the Columbus Outpost in the south to the Mall in the north - we got patrolmen all up and down the Jenckes Hill Road. The caravan I was in, the one carrying all the year’s tithings to Wolf Hill, was on the old 295 road when it got jumped by raiders - just north of Woonasquatucket crossing. They chased me all through the swamp before giving up. Wasn’t til the second day I picked up what I think is old Smith Street trail, and I’ve been following it south because I know there’s other settlements in the south who aren’t under the PPD. There’s a settlement someplace round Mount Hope, too. They’re Jews though, and word from traders is they don’t let anybody stay there who isn’t one - you gotta marry into one of the families and agree to live by their customs and such. They’re not exactly at </span>
  <em>
    <span>war</span>
  </em>
  <span> with the PPD, but they’re not friendly with them either. They don't ever tithe wives or soldiers to Wolf Hill.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Every Jewish person I’ve ever known personally has been pretty chill, and they’ve got a cultural sacred hospitality thing in common with native folks. I’d feel bad strolling up on their doorstep with no goods to trade, though, and I’m pretty sure my shellfish-gathering skills would not impress them.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Why not?” Sarah asked. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Because shellfish isn’t kosher. Jewish food rules.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     She shrugged and said,  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I was hoping to maybe run into a trader caravan there who’d maybe let me go with them. I’ve heard it said that there’s Indians on Aquidneck.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Something flipped itself over in my stomach at that, and I asked,</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “There are Indians on Aquidneck?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “The traders say there are, anyway,” Sarah said. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Well, if there’s Indians on Aquidneck, I’m definitely interested in meeting them. That’s only twenty-odd miles south of here, if I’m remembering right. Back when we had cars and roads, I could have made a trip from Providence to Newport in an hour maybe, traffic willing. We hug the coast, we can probably get there from here before sundown - but it’s probably better to take the trip in two bites. It’d give us time to scrape together some food, and I’m pretty sure I’m gonna want a nap by afternoon because I didn’t sleep a whole lot last night. So maybe we plan on making camp overnight somewhere in Bristol?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “That mean I can come with you?” she asked, a hungry look in her eyes. “I promise not to make any trouble, and I can try to make myself useful if you tell me what needs doing. I don’t know the geography like you seem to - but I know how to cook, and how to spin and weave and knit and sew. I’ve got two good hands and a strong back.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “You know how to paddle a canoe?” I asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “‘fraid I don’t,” she said, frowning.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Well, then that’s the first lesson of the day - after we scratch together some breakfast. There’s plenty more mussels and cattails where I was gathering last night. We’re going to need more firewood, though - you want to get that while I get food?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Alright,” she said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     She stuck her hand out at me, and it took a couple of seconds before I realized that she wanted me to shake it, like we were making a deal. She smiled at me when I caught on. She had the kind of sinewy, callused hands that meant she did real work with them.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Today was already looking better than yesterday. </span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Chapter 7</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>The first rule of fiction is that things get worse before they get better.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>     I made another pot of mussel, cattail, and bottled water soup. The fire was really smokey, because most of the wood she’d gathered was pine and some of it was damp, but I wasn’t about to complain. All I needed this fire to do was boil a quart of water. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Sarah and I shucked mussels into the not-boiling-yet cattail water as we talked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I’ve got a couple of spare sets of clothes in my pack, if you wanted to change,” I said, gesturing broadly to her current attire. You’ve gotta be cold in that sundress. Got some rain boots, too, that’ll do better in the swamp than those canvas shoes.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “What do you want in exchange for clothes?” she asked, looking at me hard through the smoke. The same wary edge that she’d had last night was back in her voice.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “That’s the second time you’ve asked me something like that,” I said. “I don’t think we’re on the same page about what it means.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     "I’m a woman and you’re a man, and I’ve got nothing to trade with,” she said. “That might mean something to some people. There’s men who figure that if they find a woman wandering alone in the wastes, and they let her sit by their fire and eat their food, that they’re entitled to certain things from her after that.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>      Oh. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Oh.</span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Ok, so first off I’m not a rapist,” I said. “Second, I’m not a man. I identify as two-spirit, or indigiqueer, or just genderfluid for people who’d need me to teach a whole ‘indigenous gender 101’ course for them to understand the first two terms. I’m not a man, </span>
  <em>
    <span>and</span>
  </em>
  <span> I’m not a woman - I move freely between both spaces. I tend to skew more ‘woman’ most of the time, but not enough that I’d be comfortable calling myself a transwoman. There was probably a word in my ancestors’ language for the gender I am, but I don’t know it.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “None of what you just said made any sense at all,” Sarah said, looking at me like I’d been spouting word salad. I sighed.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I’m not going to ask you for sexual favors in exchange for basic hospitality,” I said. “Or at all, in fact, because we don’t know eachother like that. I scavenged all these clothes from an abandoned storefront in Cranston. I can only wear one set of clothes at once. I have extra clothes, you need clothes, so it just makes sense for me to give you clothes. People are supposed to help people. If you show up hungry on my doorstep, and I have food, I can’t call myself a good person if I don’t give you some. Does </span>
  <em>
    <span>that</span>
  </em>
  <span> make sense to you?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Not really,” she said, still giving me suspicious eyes. “But I am cold in this stupid presentation dress, so if you’re offering I’ll take you up on the offer. Just wanted to be sure you know that you’re not getting anything back from me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I nodded and gestured to the pack, sitting in the tent next to my sleeping bag. She went in and zipped the flap behind her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I looked down at the fire, poking pieces of wood around for better airflow. The future, it seemed, was an utterly crapsack world. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     She came back out of the tent dressed, like me, in layers of hiking gear. I poured out the soup into two cups and handed her one.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “So you mentioned yesterday that you’ve got sisters?” I asked, just to try and make conversation. The soup was still too hot to eat. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Well just the one now, since Nell died,” she said quietly. “Got two brothers and a sister, now. Growing up it was Peter, Anna, Joshua, me and Nell. There were two little ones that never got names because they didn’t make it to a year old, too. I was close with Nell, but nobody else was because we all knew she was gonna be a tithing someday on account of being a third-born girl.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “How does that work - the tithing, I mean?” I asked. “It wasn’t a thing back when I’m from.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Every homestead has to give up their third-born son and their third-born daughter to the PPD when they’re sixteen years of age. Girls become wives, and boys become soldiers or workers. Most kids born to PPD officers get trained up young to be officers themselves when they come of age, so they’ve got to have others to do homesteading work and hunting and trading and all. All folks in the PPD have tattoos put on their wrists, so everyone knows what their job is just from looking.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Sparta runs on slavery,” I said. “Good to know.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “What?” she asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Never mind, long story. You were saying?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Well, our family’s only got two sons, so we never tithed a boy. Couldn’t get away with not tithing a girl - the tithing men come every six months and take a census when they take our tithes, and they know how many kids each family’s got and their ages and birth order and all. Our family was earmarked to tithe a girl child, because my mother bore three that lived. Then Nell died. Anna’s already married with a little one of her own and another on the way, so it couldn’t have been her. That left me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “What would have happened if your family refused to tithe?” I asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “You refuse to tithe, you’re likely to get your house burned down,” she said, flatly. “If a whole settlement says they’re not tithing, the PPD casts them off and lets the raiders take care of them. It happened out in Greenwich when I was a kid - there just isn’t a settlement in Greenwich anymore. The PPD sent out messengers making sure everyone knew it. Anyone who doesn’t have police protection gets picked clean by raiders inside of a year.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “You said that the settlement on Mount Hope doesn’t tithe, though,” I said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I did say that,” she said. “They’ve got to put off raiders all the time because of it, with nobody’s help but their own. Nobody knows how they’ve lasted so long. I’ve heard people - traders and PPD officers - say that they’ve got </span>
  <em>
    <span>deals</span>
  </em>
  <span> with the raiders, that they trade with them and offer them quarter and things like that. The officers say it makes the raiders stronger, which is bad for everybody.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I made a neutral noise of comprehension, not willing to weigh in on the subject. I was trying to think of a way to push the conversation to some other subject when I heard the unmistakable sound of a shotgun being cocked. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I looked up to see a group of people walking around from the side of the church ruins. Two of them had guns trained on me and Sarah. They were raggedy-looking, dressed in layers of mismatched clothes that looked like they'd never seen a washing machine. Lots of patches and visible mending. In post-apoc movies, wasteland clothes always looked high-fashion - straps and buckles and rivets and spikes, and asymmetric hems and artfully draping cloaks, a hundred pockets of questionable utility. Armor made from car tires or license plates or street signs. The crew advancing on us didn’t look like post-apocalypse punks; they just looked homeless. Homeless and well-armed. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     The man who was taking point looked forty or fifty maybe. Another man just behind and to his left looked about my age. They looked enough alike that they were probably related - same middling brown skin, same prominent eyes, same dark hair. A third man walked a ways behind them and to the right, carrying an aluminum baseball bat. He was maybe in his thirties, didn’t look like the other two. Gangly-tall, looking rangey and starved. Pale, freckly, redhead. Had a healing black eye on the right side, all yellow and purple.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “That sure is a lot of nice camping gear you’ve got there,” the man taking point said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “We’re not looking for trouble,” I said, holding up my hands. I glanced over to Sarah; she was holding her hunting knife in a fist, slowly edging backwards.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Well that’s a shame, because you found it,” the man at point said. “Where are you kids coming from? You </span>
  <em>
    <span>do</span>
  </em>
  <span> know this is Blue Dog territory, yeah?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I don’t know anything about local politics,” I said. “Just passing through.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “This isn’t the kind of place you just pass through, kid,” he said. “How about this - me and mine get to keep all this nice gear you’ve got, and you two lovebirds get to walk away in one piece.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “There’s folks who’d pay good for the girl,” Redhead said from the back of the pack.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “She looks like more trouble than she’s worth,” the younger of the two dark-haired men said. “We sell that boat in EP, we can all buy ourselves pleasant company for a while.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “You can have it,” I said. “You can have all this stuff. We don’t want any trouble. We just want to go.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Then you two had better get gone, before I change my mind,” man-at-point said.  “If you’re still in Blue Dog territory by nightfall, deal’s off.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I looked at Sarah. She looked back at me and nodded.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     We started running.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Chapter 8</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>     I ran until I couldn’t anymore, which didn’t seem far enough. Being frozen for a century and more was apparently not great for one’s physical fitness. I doubled over, bracing my hand on my knees, panting.  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     We weren’t going to be padding anywhere today. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Those weren’t the same raiders that were chasing me,” she panted. “Wasn’t me led them to you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “It was the fire,” I said, feeling defeated. “I should have been more careful. You found me because you saw the fire, and you said there were raiders that we should be worrying about. I should have put the pieces together and put the fire out.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “What’re you gonna do now?” she asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I hadn’t really been conscious of where we were running to, just what we were running from - but we’d been running along Benefit Street, parallel to the new shoreline. Benefit Street came to an abrupt end into a swampy riverbank a block or two ahead of us. I looked around, trying to get my bearings. There was a mostly-intact building to my right. It was stocky and square, made of ivy-covered cinderblock. Neoclassical columns.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     That was the Providence Athenaeum. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     That meant this was the corner of Benefit and College. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Ok, ok,” I said, panting a little, moving to sit on the athenaeum steps. “We double back to that last street we passed, that’ll be George street. You said that there’s a settlement up on Mount Pleasant? George crosses Hope. We follow Hope north, that’ll bring us to Mount Pleasant. Maybe they’ll let us stay for a few days. Maybe they have connections that can get us safe passage to Boston. That’s where you wanted to go, right?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Boston’s an awful long way to go north, if your real plan’s going south,” she said. “You said you wanted to go meet the other Indians at Aquidneck.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Boston is, like, fifty miles from Providence. Less,” I said. “I could </span>
  <em>
    <span>walk</span>
  </em>
  <span> there in a couple of days. I know a whole song about a sailing ship that does a run from Portland Maine to Yarmouth Sound in eighteen hours, and that’s four times as far. New England is small and sailboats are fast. It has just become super apparent to me that travelling alone overland is not going to be an option. So I need to do what you were planning to do; hitch on with a fortified group of other travellers. I will admit to not knowing a ton about Judaism, just what I picked up from having Jewish friends on social media and Jewish classmates at Dartmouth, but I know they do sacred hospitality.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “My dad always said that you’ve got to be careful about who you let inside your settlement,” Sarah said. “That you can’t tell a beggar from a thief until they’ve robbed you,” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     "Given the apparent state of the world, I can see how that might be pragmatic,” I said, hauling myself up to my feet. “But all we can do in knock on their door and find out what their stance is on welcoming strangers. Worst they can do is turn us away.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “You really think that’s the worst they can do?” she asked, looking at me like she thought I was either stupid or crazy. I sighed and tossed my head toward George Street, then started walking that way. Took a minute before I heard footsteps behind me that meant she was following. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “You don’t seem as mad as you ought to be at those raiders for taking all your things,” Sarah said at length. “Most men would be scheming on how to get their gear back about now.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Like I said before, not a man,” I said. “Besides, it was hardly even mine, I scavenged it from a store yesterday morning. I still have the clothes on my back, and neither of us got shot, so that’s a win in my book.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Attitude like that’ll get you fleeced by every raider from Boston to New York,” Sarah said, “and every trader and trapper and hunter, too. Did you really not have any raiders at all, back in the old times?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Depends on what qualifies a person as a raider,” I said. “Violent citizen-on-citizen crime was on the decline, in my time. People who needed to steal to get by mostly stole from corporations - illegally dumpster-dived, shoplifted from stores, that kind of thing. Getting robbed at gunpoint like we just were wasn’t so much a thing because it was a high risk, low reward crime. That’s evidently not true anymore.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Must have been nice to not have raiders,” she said. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “What makes people decide to be raiders?” I asked, glancing back at her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Being too lazy or too vicious to make an honest living,” she said with flinty conviction. “Raiders just take whatever they want from honest hardworking folks, shoot you as soon as look at you, and do worse to women who they get their filthy hands on. We tithe to the PPD because they keep us safe from raiders.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Except when they don’t,” I said. “Like when your caravan got sacked.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “That kind of thing hardly ever happens,” she said. “The roads are mostly safe to travel, if you’re in a big caravan with officers and all. The raiders must have seen the tithing men pass on their way out of wolf hill and been waiting at the crossing. I know that a bunch of the raiders got shot, when everything was happening. Don’t know how many. Only two of them were tailing me through the swamp, after the raid.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “If the PPD are so great, why don’t you want to be a PPD wife?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I don’t want to be Jackson Miller’s wife in particular,” she said, quietly. “He’s one of the officers that comes with the tithingmen’s caravan twice a year. He’s been trying to court me since I was fourteen, telling me how much nicer things are at Wolf Hill compared to the settlements.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “But?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “But there’s something oily about him that I just don’t like,” Sarah said. “Can’t really put a finger on it, and it’s stupid, and it wasn’t ever going to work out for me and Beckett anyhow-”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Who’s Beckett?” I asked. She stopped walking, and I paused and looked back at her. She was looking down at her feet, arms crossed over her chest.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Beckett Martin is the boy who wasn’t even going to marry me,” she said. “It’s not worth talking about. I can’t go home anyway or I’ll just end up tithed again, so all of that’s done.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I don’t think we ever went over last names, when we first met,” I said. “My whole name is Blackbird Odamôganak Elderkin. Yours?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I don’t have a last name, I was tithed,” she said, something hot and tight creeping into her voice. Like I should have known that and I was being difficult on purpose. “Girls don’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>have</span>
  </em>
  <span> last names, not until they’re married. Girls borrow their last names from their fathers, just so everyone knows what steading they belong to, but once they’re tithed they can’t claim that name anymore. When some man claims me as a bride, then his name will be my name. Until then, I don’t have one!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know that it would be an upsetting thing to ask, and I’ve hurt you in asking it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     It was quiet for a while as we walked. I tried to pick out landmarks I knew in the ruins; Hope Street itself was a flat stretch of grass and clover with occasional scrub. There were trees on either side, long since overgrown from their little squares of pavement. We walked past what had been the sports fields around Moses Brown, thick with trees and shrubs that were starting the show their first leaves. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “What kind of name is Blackbird, anyway?” Sarah asked, breaking the long stretch of silence.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “It’s a name I picked for myself when I was fourteen,” I said. “The name I had before didn’t fit anymore.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “What was the name you had before?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Not one I’m going to tell you,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s rude to ask about names that’ve been laid aside, just for future reference.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Sorry,” she said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “It’s ok, I know you didn’t know,” I said. “I come from a different time and a different culture, grew up by different rules. I won’t hold that against you, if you don’t hold it against me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Sounds fair,” Sarah said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I might have said more, but we came around the bend where Hope met Olney and passed by the ruins of the YMCA and I could see, a couple of blocks ahead, a distinct change in the scenery.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     From the corner of Hope and Phillips on, the ruins had been levelled to bare ground with short grass - a block-wide lawn leading up to a well-maintained brick wall. Had to be ten or twelve feet tall, spanning as far as I could see in both directions from the corner. The top of it had </span>
  <em>
    <span>castle battlements</span>
  </em>
  <span>. There’d be no way to approach that with any kind of stealth, which was probably the point. I turned from Hope to Cypress - there’d been some pretty extensive remodeling of the original streets here. What had been the corner of Morris and Sessions was squared off, a lawn leading up to a big arched doorway between two guard towers; a passage big enough to drive a pickup truck through, maybe. There were men with rifles perched on top, watching me and Sarah as we approached. On the wall above the gate, there was a painted wooden sign that said something in Hebrew. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     We had evidently found the Jewish settlement on Mount Hope. </span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Chapter 9</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Not sure how happy I am with this chapter; might edit later</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>     By the time we actually got to the gate, someone was waiting for us there - A man who was probably in his fifties, flanked on either side by guys with shotguns. I should have been more freaked out about that, given my recent history with armed men both before and after being frozen for a century - but there was something implicitly non threatening about them. I knew, without knowing why I knew, that these were not cops. That the guns were there for ‘last resort’ measures.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “And who are you two?” the man asked as soon as we were close enough that he didn’t have to shout.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “My name is Blackbird Odamôganak Elderkin. I was incarcerated in the year 2044 and I’ve been in cryo since then. Morning before last, I woke up. Met Sarah here near Benefit Street. This morning, we were set on by raiders who took everything except the clothes on our backs. She’s trying to reach Boston; I’m trying to find passage to Aquidneck Island. We were hoping you’d be willing to help.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Blackbird, Sarah,” he said, nodding to each of us, “I’m </span>
  <span>Ezra Biedermann, community chairman of Mount Hope.</span>
  <span> You understand that we have to check you for weapons before letting you inside? These are dangerous times, and our children live here.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I put my hands up, assuming the ‘go ahead and frisk me’ pose. The bodyguards looked at eachother, one of them nodded, the other one handed his rifle to the older man and stepped up to give me a pat-down.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “He’s not carrying,” he said to the older man. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     He moved to check Sarah, but she scrambled backward saying,</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “No no no no no! Nobody’s touching me!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     The bodyguard stopped moving and put his hands up in a ‘peace’ gesture.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Sarah,” I said, turning to her, “It’s ok. They just want to make sure we’re not carrying hidden weapons.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “No man is putting his hands on me,” she insisted, squaring her shoulders. She was probably trying to look tough or defiant or something, but really she just looked scared.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Would it be alright if they got a </span>
  <em>
    <span>woman</span>
  </em>
  <span> to come and check you? Because it’s pretty reasonable for them to want to check us, given that we just strolled up out of the waste.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     She looked at the group of men, and at me, and back out the gate at the way we’d come.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Alright,” she said, after a long moment of hesitation. “But only if it’s a woman.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     It took less than five minutes for not just one woman but a group of them to arrive. They formed a human screen while one of them patted Sarah down. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     They took the hunting knife from her. Only then were we formally welcomed inside.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “So if you’ll forgive my skepticism,” Ezra said, “That’s quite a story you have - being frozen and all. It’s a lot of years since I’ve heard of anyone waking up from cryo. If it’s true, there’s a lot of students who’d love to talk to you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Absolutely true, and I’m more than willing to tell the story,” I said. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “You two hungry?” he asked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Well, the raiders kind of interrupted breakfast,” I said, “and all I’ve eaten since the year 2044 is cattails and mussels so….”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Ezra laughed at that and said,</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “You, funny man, I think I’m gonna like you.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Not a man, actually,” I said as Sarah and I were escorted down what had been Sessions street last time I’d been here. Where the Brown Stadium should have been, there was a field divided into squares and rectangles with borders of trees and shrubs. The ground was mostly blanketed in clover and vetch, but there were some kale plants and what looked like beet or turnip greens bedded on either side with bundles of straw.  There were chickens running around without regard for paths or boundaries.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I’m a permaculture farming specialist,” I said, looking at the rows as we passed, “I’d be very interested in trading notes with your farmers here.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “I’m sure we can make that happen,” Ezra said. “But I want to put you two in front of Devvie first.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Ezra and his guards escorted us to a brick building that I recognized as the Jewish community center that’d been across from Nathan Bishop. I’d never been inside it before, but I knew it as a landmark. Knew, objectively, that it had a pool and a library - or at least it had back in 2044.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     There was a bit of bustle and talk when we entered, a flurry of quick introductions to a dozen different people. The building had functioning electricity. They also had running water and soap, which meant I could properly wash my hands and face for the first time since waking up in the future. There was talk about showers at some undecided point in the near future, and about laundry facilities.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “The roof was all redone in solar shingle back in the 2030’s,” a woman whose name I’d already lost was saying, “So the community center never really lost power, after the plague. We’ve had people living here all the way through, and we’ve got records and accounts about those times.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Inside of half an hour, Sarah and I were sitting at a table in a cafeteria with bowls of soup and bread with butter, opposite Ezra and a very old woman with keen brown eyes.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Blackbird, Sarah, I’d like you to meet Devorah Galinsky. She’s been our chief historian for the last sixty years. Her parents were among the original founders of our community.” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Very pleased to meet you, and thank you very much for your kindness,” I said.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” Ezra insisted, waving his hand dismissively. “Now, you tell Devvie here what you told me when you came in, about you being from the year 2044.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     I gave a brief rundown of the events leading to my arrest and the events since waking, and the two of them just listened and made encouraging or sympathetic noises every so often.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “...So here we are now,” I finished. “I’m not even sure when now is, relative to when I was put away-”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Today is the 20th of Tevet, in the year 5921,” Devvie interrupted in the way that little old ladies reserve the right to. “On the new goyish calendar, it’s the 25th of January, 116. On the Gregorian calendar, which is the one most people used before the measles, it’s the 18th of January, 2161. We keep track of all three, here. Never know when it might be useful to know when something was, eh?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “That is indeed super useful,” I said. “I’d love to learn more about your community, and about the history of the world for the last hundred years, and about local factions and politics and all. I’m afraid that stories are all I have to offer in return.”</span>
</p><p><span>     “You’re </span><em><span>guests</span></em><span>, dear, you don’t need to trade anything!” Devvie said. “But I’d be happy to listen to your stories if you want to tell them.</span><span><br/></span> <span>But first, this one, she’s so quiet!” Ezra said, turning to Sarah. “Will you tell us your story, dear?”</span></p><p>
  <span>     Sarah looked at me, like she was asking me what she should do. I just raised my eyebrows a little. She stared at her hands the whole time as she told them about coming from Lincoln. About being tithed, and escaping raiders, and meeting me.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “You poor thing, I wish you’d come right to us,” Devvie said, patting Sarah’s hand. “You’d be surprised how many young people we see from North Providence, looking for help to get to Boston and New York. We help anyone who’s running away from the police, unless there’s a good reason to think they’re bad people.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “There’s others who’ve left from PPD territory?” Sarah asked, glancing up for a second before looking down again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Some every year,” Ezra said. “Girls and women, mostly, who’ve gotten themselves in trouble with the police.  North Providence is good for who it’s good for, and bad for everybody else.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Nobody’s ever left my settlement that I know of, unless it was to go to Wolf Hill,” Sarah said, frowning.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “And that’s what people back at your settlement will say about you, isn’t it?” Devvie pointed out. “That you went to Wolf Hill?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “But I </span>
  <em>
    <span>was</span>
  </em>
  <span> going to go to Wolf Hill,” Sarah said. “I just… it worked out that something happened so I didn’t have to is all.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “It always seems to work out that something happens for all the queer couples and pregnant girls and third sons who turn up on our doorstep,” Ezra said.  </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “When I was a little girl - ten or eleven - that’s when they were really coming together at Wolf Hill,” Devvie said. “My mother, who had the measles and lived, told me and my brothers and sisters about how the walls around Mount Hope were built. About those first days after the plague, when there was still gasoline and batteries and the internet. Our people had a better survival rate than some others; more people who got sick from measles but pulled through. The sworn account of Berta Savits, an epidemiologist at Brown, says that among the general population the infectivity of the novel measles virus was over ninety-nine percent. In the general population, the mortality rate for infected people with symptoms was ninety-six percent. In the Ashkenazi Jewish community, though, our mortality rate for infected people with symptoms was only eighty-five percent. Nobody ever got to study why that might be, but she throws around words like ‘epigenetics’ and ‘genetic bottleneck’ in her account. We locked down very early into the crisis, here in Mount Hope. The others, who were dying in their thousands, tried to blame us. Tried to say it was some kind of conspiracy, something we’d done, some reason that so many of us were surviving when so few of them were. They said that jews secretly run the government, and the media, and the economy. When they started setting houses on fire, we built a wall to keep ourselves safe. That wall has stood ever since, and no one has ever breached it by force.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “The PPD have tried,” Ezra said. “The PPD as they are now started when some cult of personality putz named himself Chief of Police because his dad had been the chief of the smithfield police. Started gathering himself a brute squad, running a protection racket on all the people who were trying to pick up the pieces of their lives. They tried to bring us to heel, when I was a kid, more than once.  We’ve always had strong walls, in my lifetime, and we’ve always had something to fight for. Our people have seen worse and come through it. That chief of police is dead now, and his son’s got the position. He’s the one that called an armistice. Now we trade with them - but police aren’t allowed inside the walls. Especially not to collect their runaways.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     “Makes me very glad that I didn’t happen to run into them on my first day,” I said, shuddering a little at the thought.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     After that first talk, Sarah and I were shown the guest quarters, which were inside the community center itself. I took a nap for most of the afternoon, then took a shower and changed into borrowed clothes - jeans and a cable-knit sweater - while mine went into the wash. In the evening we were invited to a communal meal with everyone else who was eating in the community center cafeteria. Sarah and I were introduced to a ton of people, and I promptly forgot most of their names.</span>
  
</p><p>
  <span>     “The traders punt down the Seekonk River from Attleboro or someplace like that, just about every month unless the weather’s bad,” a man about my age was saying. “There’s a city in North Attleboro  and they’re dedicated to putting outriders on Old 95, which makes it one of the safest roads in the northeast. It’ll take you all the way to Boston, if you hitch on with a caravan going that way. There are other Jews in Boston, and in New York - we have radio contact with both communities! I don’t know from radios, though, you’d have to talk to the postmaster about that. Anyway, we all do what we can to keep the roads safe. Good trade is good for everyone.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     On the second day, Sarah got snagged right after breakfast by a group of girls who wanted to talk about spinning yarn. I ended up following a woman my mom’s age around the farm, talking about cultivars and crop rotation and organic inputs. Went on a whole tangent about the three-sisters planting scheme and how effective it was in the New England climate. Their mast crops were winter wheat and potatoes. Nobody knew what cultivars; the stock had been obtained from Whole Foods on North Main in year one after the plague.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>     Nobody in Mount Hope seemed to know anything about the Indians on Aquidneck, except that there was a city down in the Newport area. No one seemed fussed about my gender - the only people who brought it up were a couple of anthropology scholars who went on about different genders in the Torah and the Talmud. There was a seriously impressive library housed in the building that’d been the Jewish Community Day School, and I spent most of the third day in it with the scholars, and ended up telling stories about life in the old world to a crowd of note-takers. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>     On the fourth day, traders arrived from the Blackstone Boulevard gate, and there was much rejoicing.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
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